Towards the end of last summer I purchased a new laptop since I was on road quite frequently. I selected a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 notebook for two reasons: well known reliability and a I got a good deal from a friend. It was working flawlessly till I updated it with XP SP3 (note that I purchased Windows Vista Business but later installed Windows XP). I found myself having occasional lockups and reboots. I downgraded SP3 but I still found it occasionally problematic. I decided that I would eventually re-install everything when I got the chance.

Several weeks ago a collegue informed that several laptops with Nvidia video were failing due to overheating or packaging or something. I really did not pay attention for several reasons. I thought my problems were software related, I never saw noticeable video failures, and the heat/fan noise from my laptop never seemed unusual. In any event my Thinkpad totally DIED the other night. I'm reporting this information in case others might find it useful.

I have a Thinkpad T61. Core 2 Duo 7500 2.2Ghz. Nvidia Quadro 140M 128MB. My laptop info.

1. I noticed a higher number of lockups recently. The only time I could see a blue screen i noticed the following error:
MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION
Which according to Microsoft help indicates a hardware error.

2. I had updated almost every component using both Windows Update and the Thinkvantage System Update. I did manually update to BIOS 2.19-1.08 (2008/06/11). Additionally I did update the Nvidia driver.

3. A hour before the failure occured I had played with the Microsoft WorldWide Telescope application. I do not know if this is taxing the system too much.

4. When the failure occured I was not there, and upon returning I found the screen totally off. I had left the lid open. I assumed it had gone to "Standby" or "Sleep". So I tried to push the Power button for it to wakeup, but it did not respond. I tried rebooting. With no luck. The screen would not start.

5. The behavior when turning it on is as follows. The LED's blink as if it was turning on. The screen never powers up. The hard drive does power up, but I hear no major disk activity. I cannot tell if the CPU fan is active, it seems like it is. I hear no beeping or any indication that maybe just the screen is not working. Battery or external power does the same. Pretty much dead.

What to do? Well I postponed calling support because I plan to use my external SATA adapter to back up (and clean) my data. I highly recommend everyone keeps an SATA to USB adapter for times like this. (I also have a IDE to USB adapter, also about $20)

Fortunately, I did do a warranty upgrade for 2 years, drop off service. So even though I am in my original warranty period, I do not have to ship it anywhere, I can take it to a local service center. I have heard of some reports online of users insisting Dell (or other manufacturers) giving a warranty extension. I have not tried that yet, so I will make the call this week after my backup.

More to report later.

Posted in: Technology,

I spent almost 4 weeks cleaning my music collection. It was one of the most tedious, time consuming, frustrating things I've done on my computer.

I started by systematically re-ripping every CD I own. In my foolishness a few years ago many, if not all, of my albums were ripped in the Ogg Vorbis format which led them to be incompatible with my MP3 player, a Creative Zen Vision:M. Anyway for ripping I started with free ware options, but their reliance on the often error filled "freecddb" forced me to pay $20 for a utility that gathered proper CD information. That was the easy part seeing as I only have a few dozen CDs.

Then came the hard part, sorting through all the files which I had accumulated. I had to eliminate the duplicates and the songs I really didn't enjoy any more. Then I fixed up file names to better match a somewhat consistent file naming scheme. Then came the ID3 tag issue. I would say that almost 75% of the single tracks I had some type of error. Worse yet, 10 years ago when I first started with MP3's I would put "MJM" somewhere in my music. Why? I was a dumb college student. And then last year when I first got my MP3 player I had all sorts of quirks with IDv1 tags and IDv2 tags. So inconsistency was abound. The "Auto Tag" feature in Winamp was pretty helpful, but even that created funny matches.

I did totally reset my Creative Zen which lost all music, videos and worse: my playlists. Well I considered that the playlists would all be wrong anyways.

Anyway once I finished, I backed it all up to my server. Then I copied it to my Creative Zen. Oddly, I found that syncing through Winamp messed up the album art for the full album rips. So I had to use Windows Media Player 11 to sync with the album art. Once done, I used Winamp to transfer the remaining files. Of course after copying a few thousand files, I realized that certain characters were lost a plus "+" became a dash "-". Well I didn't bother fixing those.

At least I could listen to music again in the car or at work when the people across the cubes need to talk really loud about their diminishing stock returns. Unfortunately the lack of playlists is incredibly frustrating as I haven't found a good application that can manage the same playlists on both PC and MP3 player. Suggestions anyone?

And after all that, I still have plenty to do. Many albums belong to one of my brothers so I couldn't find the original. So next time I meet up with them, I need to get some CD's. Also I didn't bother cleaning up the separate sets of MP3's for Christmas music, comedy routines, self help CD's and a few hundred Hindi songs that I couldn't correct if my life depended on it. But for the time being I don't think I care much if those show up on my Zen.

Almost everyone I know who has an MP3 collection says that they've been meaning to this ... eventually. Yeah, I know what that's like. About 10 years on my TODO list and I'm almost completed.

Posted in: Music, Technology,

In no particular order, some of the music I'm listening to:

Rise Against - The Good Left Undone
Coldplay - Viva La Vida
Jack Johnson - If I Had Eyes
Band of Horse - The Funeral
Bruce Springsteen - Girls In Their Summer Clothes
Death Cab For Cutie - Crooked Teeth
Feist - 1234
GOB - Banshee Song
Rogue Wave - Lake Michigan
Rhett Miller - Come Around

Posted in: Music, Random,

I will be out of town for some rest and relaxation for a few days. I will get back to my email and other random stuff when I return.

Long overdue.

Posted in: Life, Travel,

I graduated from the University of Some School about X years ago. For the past several months, I have been receiving non-stop emails and post-cards in the mail to "update my Alumni profile" so that my information could be valid so people can contact me and know what I am doing. All the information would be updated into a big "Alumni Directory" or something like that. The thing that I find questionable is that both the emails and post-cards say that I can only do it over the phone - not email not postal mail. Additionally this service is being provided not by the University but by a third party commercial service. Reality check: if I can only update my address, my employment status and other very private tidbits of my life into a directory by a company, then I would think (I maybe wrong) that their sole purpose is to sell me access to this directory. Well, thanks, but no thanks.

I would think that these types of services are things of the past. If you open an account with Facebook, Friendster, Orkut or any of the million other "social networking" sites you can find almost everyone you ever knew. Only the "John Smith's" might be a little tricky. So for all the people who buy into this, I hope its worth your time.

I still believe that if people wanted to be in touch with me, then they would be. I don't need someone else to facilitate that for me.

Posted in: Life, Internet,